Spanish Stuffed Potato Cake and Mas Donnis Barrica

The last two days, we had gone down to OBF and finished our day both times at Rockbottom Brewery which is a few blocks away. The food was very good and I got to try the Velvet Pale Ale on a Nitro tap, which makes it smoother and creamier than the standard CO2 tap. We were happy with the food and beer, but after two days of beer tasting and pub fare, I really needed some real food, so I decided for forgo the festival on Saturday to stay home and cook some real food.

I spent a good portion of the afternoon reading the new Casa Moro cookbook which impresses me even more as I’ve been working my way through it. The husband and wife team, Sam and Samantha Clark, own Moro in London. The food at Moro is Spanish, but is primarily Spanish food that has a Moorish influence. (I haven’t eaten there, but they point this out in their books.) Their second book, Casa Moro, widens the influence to include more Moroccan and Middle Eastern influenced food. There was a recipe for potato cakes stuffed with lamb and pine nuts that looked wonderful, but which I modified to suit what I had on hand. My wife doesn’t eat lamb and I really wanted something a little lighter, so I opted to do ground chicken and didn’t have pine nuts, so I substituted almonds instead.

The basic recipe of the cakes uses a potato dough (very similar to gnocchi dough) which is stuffed with ground meat, onions, nuts and spices. The cakes are then sautéed in olive oil and served with yogurt sauce and an arugula salad. The dough is made by boiling waxy potatoes until they’re cooked and then putting them through a food mill to make a smooth puree. Add a little bit of flour to help hold them together, but like making gnocchi, don’t add too much flour or you’ll end up with a heavy dough.

For the stuffing, I sautéed onions, garlic, and ground chicken. When the chicken was cooked, I added a little tomato paste, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, slivered almonds, and cloves and cooked it for a few more minutes. I then deglazed the pan with amontillado and cooled the stuffing. Rather than make a series of smaller cakes, I opted to cook one large one that I could cut into wedges. I took half the potato dough and formed a round about ½ an inch thick and put that in a non-stick fry pan. I added the cooled stuffing, and then put the other half of the potato dough on top. I cooked it for about 10 minutes before flipping it and cooking the other side. I pulled it of when it was browned and let it sit for a few minutes before cutting it into wedges.

I though of making a side salad but we’re about to be deluged by zucchini in the garden, so instead I just served a side of sautéed zucchini with garlic and basil. Incredibly, I was a little tired of beer so I decided to open a bottle of 2004 Mas Donis Barrica from Capcanes that I had picked up at the supermarket. This wine is from Montsant outside of Taragona in Catalonia. It’s made from 80% garnacha (grenache) and 20% syrah and is aged in new French and American oak. Garnacha is a fabulous grape that makes some wonderfully food friendly wines, but it’s still often dismissed by a large proportion of wine snobs. This is largely due to the fact that often times it’s used to produce inexpensive wines of little character. But when grown correctly and with limited yields it can be an incredible wine. This wine is brought in to the US by Eric Solomon, who, along with Kermit Lynch, is a name I normally trust when buying wines from less known regions.

A little research showed that this wine is in fact made for the American market and is a favorite of Robert Parker of the Wine Advocate. Parker is the most influential wine critic in America, but he also has a particular style of wine that he likes, and many people change their winemaking to suit his tastes because it leads to higher scores, and the possibility of selling all of your wine at a higher price. Parker tends to like big, highly extracted, heavily oaked wines but that have a lot of fruit up front (which has given rise to such terms as “fruit bombs” and “oodles and oodles of fruit”). Unfortunately, Robert Parker and I don’t always see eye to eye on wines, because I tend to like more restrained understated wines that actually go with food (foolish me). The 16% alcohol fruit bombs that he raves about are often the most unfriendly to good food. The good side of this is that he doesn’t always give great scores to wines that I like, so they tend to stay less expensive than his latest find.

The winemakers at Capcanes know Parker’s palate and know how to make a wine for the US market. The wine is very dark and has a deep, rich intense nose. There’s a lot of black cherry, raspberry, spice and vanilla from oak. The oak is fairly pronounced but doesn’t go over the top. It has rich flavors and a moderate tannic bite, but the tannins aren’t too hard. There is a huge amount of fruit in the palate and finish. This is definitely a wine from the newer school of Spanish winemaking. The old school of Spanish winemaking also used a long periods of oak aging, but generally the oak wasn’t new, so it wasn’t as pronounced. Parker loves this wine and rated it 90 points and this time I agree with him. It’s a beautiful wine and was a delight to drink. I would have preferred a little more finesses and less oak, and I suspect he would have liked it to be bigger and oakier. In any event, it’s still a bargain at about $12 a bottle. Happily it comes with a fake cork, so there’s no chance of the wine being corked, which is a subject I will save for another time.

The wine was a little big for the food, but its richness made it stand up to the spices which can often be a problem for wine (and why I often prefer beer with sweet spices like cinnamon and ginger). It’s a wine I’d happily drink again, but would serve it next time with a roast or a rich braised dish.